For a moment I toyed with responding by denigrating and dehumanising a personality you admire until you feel the pain. I am sure that I could find one. It is not what I would do and what I would enjoy, though. I don't understand this wish to make Muslims (or anyone else) suffer. How you can support that is beyond me.

Name someone who is being mocked for their identity in the context of this discussion.

None of my Muslim friends are being mocked for their identity if I mock Mohammed. None of my Christian friends are being mocked if I mock Jesus. And if you mock Elvis and I love Elvis, I'm not being mocked for my identity. If I get upset about it, then I should lighten up. I have noted that some people on this site tend to get nasty and personal if their political heroes get mocked. This may sometimes be amusing but usually it's tiresome.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II

My Muslim friends tend to take attacks on their religion (where mocking Mohammed really isn't encouraged, to put it mildly) as attacks on themselves. Being a member of the majority religion I am very relaxed, but if I lived somewhere where Christians are a persecuted minority, I would probably be rather thin-skinned and see attacks of my religion as attacks on my identity too.

And we have had at least one ET contributor leave the blog because he perceived an attack on the Pope's political positions as a personal attack on him (the contributor).

At some level you have to accept that if you believe a topic is fair game in political discussion and somebody else is personally offended, the problem is not with the political discussion. At least that appears to be a ground rule of this here forum: no subject matters are out of order (there are exceptions: we have on occasion banned openly antisemitic content and anything that could lead to legal liability for the blog itself, such as libel or copyright violation).

Personally, I find that a lot of the Mohammed cartoon issue involves people in a politically dominant group gratuitously offending people in a minority group. I fail to see what above-board political argument is advanced by publishing a slew of cartoons that the publishers know will cause offence, and with the deliberate aim of causing offence.

It's a bit like the joke about political freedom in the USSR:

American: "The proof that we have freedom of speech in the USA is that we can march in front of the White House to protest US policy"
Russian: "We have freedom of speech in the USSR as well, the proof is that we can march in front of the American Embassy to protest US policy"

Similarly, the Danish cartoonists enjoy press freedom: the proof is that they can mock the religion of foreigners.

At some level you have to accept that if you believe a topic is fair game in political discussion and somebody else is personally offended, the problem is not with the political discussion. At least that appears to be a ground rule of this here forum: no subject matters are out of order (there are exceptions: we have on occasion banned openly antisemitic content and anything that could lead to legal liability for the blog itself, such as libel or copyright violation).

Personally, I find that a lot of the Mohammed cartoon issue involves people in a politically dominant group gratuitously offending people in a minority group. I fail to see what above-board political argument is advanced by publishing a slew of cartoons that the publishers know will cause offence, and with the deliberate aim of causing offence.

word-perfectly put.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

OTOH is it not legitimate to take an 'acted position' in order to provoke a discussion, or question an audience? In a long line since Lenny Bruce, comedians have questioned the accepted opinions of audiences of all types. These are 'acted positions' (Frank Boyle, Al Murray et al of today, as examples). These positions are aimed at a specific audience, not at the people who suffer the intolerance and bigotry.

i think it's valid, in fact it's very tempting to do so, though it's risky as many readers may not be clued in to what you are doing, and thus why.

irony has a similar problem as tools go.

as persuasive tool, it works on the half-convinced, and can backfire. one man's snark is another's canon.

maybe leg-pulling can embarrass people into dropping old attitudes, and it's fun, so... on we toil.

maybe there is a yet higher way, so unequivocal as not even need humour.

very few get there. john cleese doing 'upper class twit' probably persuaded some of the UCTs to dial back some of the more obnoxious of their affectations! once it's established your intention is mostly to get a laugh, you can enjoy more freedom to play those edges.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

The Fool is Lear's Fool (and one could argue, an extension of Lear's psyche). He is authorised to mock Lear. If another character were to mock Lear in the same way, Lear's reaction would be very different.

Other modern "fools" are questioning their audience and its accepted opinions. This is an invaluable exercise, imo. But its effectiveness stems from the fact that they question the culture from within. This is part of a process by which a culture can lose its prejudices and become broader and more tolerant.

Charlie Hebdo, as fools go (and I've been reading it on and off for forty years), has mostly carried out that function of questioning and mocking from within, and imo to sometimes devastating effect. In terms of religion, that means mostly attacking the authoritarian and reactionary positions of the Catholic clergy and, in particular, the Pope. To applause from me.

On the other hand, I don't support their choosing to mock and question the accepted beliefs of Muslims, however authoritarian and reactionary I think those beliefs may be. Such mockery from the outside is not much likely to be effective in bringing about fresh thinking in the Muslim world -- quite apart from the kneejerk tribal defence effect it is sure to have, change in Islamic culture can imo only come about through the effect of challenges from within. This is something I believe will happen (unless the planet kicks us off it before then). But it's the business of Muslims and those brought up in that culture. The "West" doesn't have lessons to hand out to them.

Yet, whether it be Jyllands Posten or Charlie Hebdo that publishes the material, it can only be perceived in the Islamic world as an emanation of the "West". Neither paper is ignorant of this. So the intention seems to me to be other than mocking in order to question and bring about a positive dynamic in the culture. It looks more like defiance, hostile acts born from a civilisation-clash worldview. And that, I dislike as much as I dislike the trolly language of ormondotvos' diary.

So the intention seems to me to be other than mocking in order to question and bring about a positive dynamic in the culture.

so very encouraging to see reasonable attitudes free of prejudice or arrogance. it's up to us to try and mend the scars of centuries, and try to rebring about the peaceful, (and amazingly productive) co-existence that has on occasion occurred between our cultures.

I'm surprised that you, afew, in particular, should characterise the current CH publication as being addressed by Occidentals to international Islam.

The comic of the life of the Prophet was written by French people, Muslim and non-Muslim, for French people, Muslim and non-Muslim.

We (including you and me, afew) live in a society in which a large number of people, French by birth, are of Muslim heritage, whether actively Muslim or not. They are friends, neighbours, colleagues, part of the fabric of society (probably a bit thin on the ground out your way). Islam is not a foreign religion in France. And it is the religion of an underprivileged minority with which CH has always manifested solidarity, to the extent that I'm quite sure that, in their own heads at least, CH do not see themselves satirising Islam from the outside, but as an aspect of a society in which they (and we) are fully part.

I was pretty ambivalent when Charlie Hebdo reprinted the Jyllands Posten drawings (however I have approved of CH's own drawings of Mahomet published on that occasion, and since). That was certainly an edgy editorial decision; and I think the editor, Charb, is right in saying that they put the cart before the horse (there is an element of implicit self-criticism in that).

But, again, I really don't much evidence of geopolitics in any of the editorial decisions of CH. To the extent that they are concerned with reactions outside France, it is with French-speaking North Africa. They have been fervent supporters of the Arab Spring, and highly critical of the rise of political Islam, in Tunisia in particular. Those who organised anti-CH demonstrations are of the Salafist tendency, i.e. the extreme right of the political spectrum of the Arab world (I hope nobody is shocked by that characterisation!)

CH in a fight with the extreme right : it's hardly a novelty.

The impact within France deserves more consideration. Later.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II

On the other hand, maybe you can. I am instantly reminded of Michael Moore's interview of Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine. Since my first viewing of that movie, it felt to me like harassment. Sort of like a happy-slappy video.

Then again, as Galbraith said,

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

My point is that there is no clear line between 'truth to power' and 'bullying' without understanding the audience that 'freedom of speech' addresses. I agree that in many, perhaps most, cases it is easy to see which is which (usually because the law is clear). But there are also cases in which the messaging can only be defined by the supposed intent.

I'm not sure what you remember, though: I don't think I debated Truthers on ET after its first year or two, well before you arrived here (ET was founded in 2005); Truthism went into decline like Birthism is now.

Given the extremely heated, improductive debate the topic tended to produce, diaries advocating such CT were declared off-limits in the Editorial Guidelines. In other words, such diaries will be deleted.

There have been no occurrences regarding 9/11. OTOH, a couple of diaries advocating Holocaust Denial have iirc been deleted (blatant falsification of historical facts).

If I searched and remember right, the last debate with Truthers I participated in was the comments of this diary from June 2007 (almost precisely two years after ET's founding). I don't remember anymore exactly when that line was added to the guidelines and with what consequence it was enforced regarding Truther diaries, but there was no talk of banning in that particular diary. At any rate, the dustup involving aircraft engines Migeru must be referring to is this (continued here and here), nine moths earlier, apparently prior to the creation of any guideline.

ET got very turned off one of the participants to the extent that that person's accounts were later closed. One of the few people who've been banned in nearly eight years of this forum. So it really isn't a pleasant memory.

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